Education
Category archives for Education
An Experiment in Teaching Writing: A Look Inside the Sausage Factory
Posted by Chad Orzel on February 14, 2012 As I’ve said a bazillion times already this term, I’m teaching a class that is about research and writing, with a big final paper due at the end of the term. Because iterative feedback is key to learning to write, they also have to turn in a complete rough draft, which I will mark up…
Course Report: A Brief History of Timekeeping 04
Posted by Chad Orzel on February 8, 2012 Through a weird quirk of scheduling, I haven’t actually taught the intro modern physics course since I started writing pop-science books about modern physics. So, this week has been the first chance I’ve really had to use material I generated for the books to introduce topics in class. In the approximately chronological ordering of the…
A Toy Model of the Arrow of Time
Posted by Chad Orzel on January 25, 2012 The toy model of statistical entropy that I talked about the other day is the sort of thing that, were I a good computational physicist, I would’ve banged out very quickly. I’m not a good computational physicist, but by cargo-culting my way through some of the VPython examples, I managed to get something that mostly…
How to Present Scientific Data
Posted by Chad Orzel on January 19, 2012 In the same basic vein as last week’s How to Read a Scientific Paper, here’s a kind of online draft of the class I’m going to give Friday on the appropriate ways to present scientific data. “Present” here meaning the more general “display in some form, be it a talk, a poster, a paper, or…
Course Report: A Brief History of Timekeeping 02
Posted by Chad Orzel on January 13, 2012 I reported on the start of this class last week, and sinc ethen, we’ve had three more class meetings. Since this whole thing is an experiment, I’ll keep reporting on it from time to time (heh). First, though, a quick answer to a request from comments: I’d like to hear more about your class on…
How to Read a Scientific Paper
Posted by Chad Orzel on January 10, 2012 My course this term is on time and timekeeping, but is also intended as a general “research methods” class. This was conceived by people in the humanities, where the idea of generic research methods makes a lot more sense than in the sciences (where there’s a lot more specialization by subfield), but I’m going to…
In Which I Am Grumpy About Education
Posted by Chad Orzel on January 9, 2012 In comments to Friday’s snarky post, I was chided for not engaging with the critique of standardized testing offered by Washington Post education blogger Valerie Strauss. I had intended to say more about the general topic, as there have been a bunch of much-cited articles in a similar vein crossing my RSS reader recently, but…
Shameless Innumeracy
Posted by Chad Orzel on January 6, 2012 On last month’s post about the public innumeracy of a Florida school board member, Tom Singer posts an update, which includes a link to a follow-up at the Washington Post blog that started the whole thing. In the course of rounding up reactions to the original, the author, Valerie Strauss, writes: In fact, there were…
On the Helpfulness of Numbers
Posted by Chad Orzel on January 5, 2012 Anybody who has taught introductory physics has noticed the tendency, particuarly among weaker students, to plug numbers into equations at the first opportunity, and spend the rest of the problem manipulating nine-digit decimal numbers (because, of course, you want to copy down all the digits the calculator gives you. Many faculty, myself included, find this…
Course Report: A Brief History of Timekeeping 01
Posted by Chad Orzel on January 4, 2012 As mentioned a few times previously, the class I’m teaching this term is a “Scholars Research Seminar” on time and timekeeping. As this is an entirely new course, and will be consuming a lot of my mental energy, I plan to post occasional reports on what I’m doing to the blog. Today was the first…
